Firefox 6 too slow? Try Pale Moon 6 instead

Recent Firefox releases seem to show that Mozilla are making a genuine effort to eliminate the browser’s performance issues.

If you’re not yet satisfied, though, Pale Moon 6, released today, may be of interest. The browser is based on Firefox -- looks almost identical, works in exactly the same way, supports most (though not all) extensions and add-ons -- but has been carefully optimized to deliver better performance and security.

How much better? As ever, it’s difficult to come up with a single meaningful figure. Pale Moon is compiled to make better use of modern CPUs, which gives it potential performance advantages in every area, but benchmarking shows a range of results.

SunSpider 0.91, for instance, gives Pale Moon 6 a performance lead over Firefox 6 in just about every area, peaking at around a 10% gain. Some tests showed no significant speed advantages, though, so overall Pale Moon scored around 5-percent faster in our tests.

It was a similar story with Mozilla’s Dromaeo benchmark; Pale Moon led the way in every test, but the margin was small, giving the browser around a 2.5-percent performance advantage over Firefox 6 on our test system.

And Futuremark’s Peacekeeper benchmark confirmed this general pattern, awarding Firefox a score of 5,777, while Pale Moon achieved 6,082: a 5.2-percent lead.

Pale Moon 6 won’t revolutionize your online experience, then, but it’s still managing to squeeze just a little extra performance from the Firefox codebase, and the latest builds, including a 64-bit andportable version, are available now.